Author: Thomas Stark
Stark, Thomas, 2024 The Space Between Categories: A Creative Search for Asexual Narrative Structure, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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The Space Between Categories: A Creative Search for Asexual Narrative Structure constitutes two distinct but interrelated pieces of work:
Category X is a creative novel designed to explore sociocultural assumptions about heterosexual desire and its role in narrative structure. The novel attempts to highlight and redress some common literary tropes that rely on asexuality acting as an “antagonistic” force. It deploys asexuality as a potentially informing counternarrative to conventional narrative structure (contextualised here as “heteronarrativity”).
Category Y is an exegesis and explores some of the ways in which heteronarrativity re-encapsulates deviations from its usual structure. I argue here that Category X fails to subvert the heteronarrative, and that, despite redressing a significant number of problematic tropes and avoiding some common structural traps, it ultimately reinforces the phenomenological paradigm of the heteronormative assumptions that feed it.
Keywords: sexuality, asexuality, narrative, heteronarrative, heteroideology, subversion, creative writing, young adult, coming out, coming of age
Subject: Creative Arts thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2024
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Amy Matthews